Flights from Liverpool are not sustainable, although the captain tells us of great news – Easy jet are planting trees to offset the carbon toll – frankly about half way through the flight, with a plane load of hysterical liverpudlians - that’s staff and passengers - all squeaking on in their cheeky chappie voices and laughing like Stan Boardman voice trained hyenas, for 2 hours - you don’t give a fuck about global warming, you wouldn’t give a shit if the entire universe caught fire and vanished like a burning Amaretti paper, if the other thing it’s impossible to comprehend that the universe is in disappeared down a cosmic plughole in a roll top bath with claw feet. You would merely experience a gentle sense of relief, a light but warm wind on your face and a gentle lapping of lakeshore waves about your bare feet - kind of a feeling.

I was in this air born tube of skallys as I was speaking at a conference in Barcelona, this had seemed like a good idea back in a wet and cold Lake District January, only trouble was I didn’t really look into what the conference was beforehand and I don’t think they really checked me out. My talk went down like a base jumper without a parachute, a kind of collective ‘are you telling me I ‘ve just run over my own child’ sort of response, no questions just a desperate ‘please get him of the stage before I become a puddle’ collective look. Recently I have been getting rather disturbingly enthusiastic responses to my talks so I really wasn’t ready for this and found it a rather awkward. Post talk none of the previously friendly people would talk to me, I walked through the crowd as if I had suddenly gained a force field that kept people a strict 10ft from me.

All in all it was one of the strangest conference style events I ve ever been to - imagine an Artist Newsletter (artist support agency) conference on how to get on in sculpture, maybe called ‘Making it Big’. The date is mid 80’s, the event is in multiple languages and the speakers have been selected by a room full of monkeys with a typewriter.

The guy who was MC was hyper friendly, every time he passed me – hand flapping, Groucho Marx walking - he would indicate two rather straight Americans with the words ‘doze guyzere kcrazy, a’m tellink yu, my got yez, dere crazzie’ the two besuited artist/managers of the Hudson river sculpture trail (100 miles of very big sculptures) look back blankly each time. Having seen their talk I am inclined to agree with the MC but possibly for different reasons. The question and answer section of their talk became a series of one upmanship anecdotes on moving large sculptural weights, ‘ I brought 30 tons back from Careara, 2,000 bucks shipping, 100 bucks to the fork lift driver, slip a couple o’ hundred to the guys in customs’. This sure aint critical theory.

Another presentation about a sculpture trail in Andorra called ‘Men of Steel’ features 7 men of a certain age making steel sculpture to celebrate the – now closed - iron mines of Andorra. One piece is a frieze of cut steel of vaguely figuerative forms. One cant help thinking how thrilled the miners must have been, how they would (given the chance) have sat for hours musing on the human condition, contemplating the man/earth transformation conundrum. Maybe the legacy of the mines is better expressed by the many monumental objects it has contributed to situated around the world, now these shipping tonnages I suspect may just piss on the tonnages we had already heard of. I look at this stuff and wonder why on earth anyone wants to do it, it looks hard, they tell us it’s hard, these are big things, they need death defying installation, I just don’t get it. Maybe I ve been in the art world too long and have lost any simple response I ever had to the meaningless object but does anyone actually even like these things? d’Suvero, Chilleda, these are the leaders in this field, their subject seems to be ‘exploring space’, wresteling with the pure problems of sculpture. (There are lots of references throughout the day to the word space and the exploration of it, I always hear it as outer space and momentarily think ‘oh that sounds good’ ‘exploring urban space’, ‘a journey into space’ Space is the place – no they didn’t say that’s a Sun Ra film).

The highlight talk was a close run thing between a man (traffic planner I think) that talked at length about roundabouts and the placing of art on them. Mainly he showed examples of dangerous, disproportioned, aesthetically displeasing…. there was a long list of things that were wrong and a very short one on things that were right. It was pretty funny for quite a long time (about 15 minutes –the talk lasted about 40), the range of works seemed to encompass examples of the art shown throughout the day. By this time in the conference I was considering that the whole thing maybe was a spoof, that some art people had set me up, maybe something to do with the Big Art Project (Channel 4 reality art programme in the making).

This talk was followed by Magdalena Abakanowicz, like Marina Abromovitch in her delivery and to some extent content. Her lecture started with a totally wild suggestion that all people of the world no longer had to worry about hunger of other physical discomforts (I think she meant Europe). She then stated ‘munkindt aulshow now haz zee chapacity tu exshterminate heemzelf einshtantly’ all delivered in a stacatto Russian Dalek voice. Sadly the talk then declined into a description of how she made her sculpture groups and the ease of shipping vast tonnages with only a brief return at the end to the Dalek manifesto. She also showed a classically poor quality piece of film documentation of a Butoh dance piece she had made in Japan, which was rather amazing – she was rather amazing full stop. Of course it was all that post war everything is shit and hopeless Beckett stuff so beloved of that generation, mankind is a mutant headless zombie type thing living in a hole, bag, bin, concrete shoes you know the sort of thing. Then I remembered that we all loved that ‘life is shit and then you die’ thing back in the day when art had only the serious message, then around 1978 someone made this terrible T shirt that said ‘Fuck art lets dance’ and then everything was alright. It really reminded me of being at art school in the 70’s.

The other talks included a presentation from the woman who advised Barcelona on public art acquisitions who seemed to be presenting her child’s home work – ‘Some sculptures you can see in Barcelona’ – in which she managed to omit Gaudi and many other of the sculptures most people would associate with Barcelona in favour of an lengthy romp through Victorian building decoration of the most dismal nature, I overheard someone describing her as an academic – Crapademic.

Possibly the most painful talk covered the works done for the 92 Olympics 8 bad examples of works by the usual suspects - still it was a long time ago and that kind of thing was kind of new then, i.e. conceptual works in places where people would not have any interpretation to explain what a series of numbers meant, or how the word born meant something different in another language. Here’s the line up for info - it is a classic; Plensa, Kornellis, Baumgarden, Ruckrheim, Horn, Merz, Munoz, Turrell, obviously one expects to see Weiner at the end of any list of artists of that period but no, here he was pioneeringly absent. The talk was equally classic, extremely long winded vague notions about understanding urban space as an environment that can be changed by the intervention of a connection to space as a understanding of.. I think it might have been a round, you know London’s burning, fire, fire etc. The rather nice conference organizer had to try and translate this shambles, he had a bit of the Robert Wagner about him, she a little of Mrs. H (Hart to Hart – 80’s TV show) ‘when day met it wus moirder’. So many people left that the organizer had to stand up and ask anyone else wanted to leave that they should do it now, generating a gurgeling drain unblocking exodus. I stuck to it not wanting to be rude and thinking how rude I could be about it later – the more I suffered the ruder I could be - without guilt. The recurring thought was that we would shortly be suffering a similar series of works for our own blood sucking, life draining celebration of the animal within (Olympics).

In the afternoon the MC changes his ‘Doze guyz are kcrazee’ to ‘you kcrazzee, my got yez, yur crazzee I’m tellink yu’ and he takes the opportunity to introduce me to all the crazy people at the conference none of whom want to talk to me (that’s how bad it was). I had dinner alone.

It all makes me think about these mini art worlds, no one at this conference knows of any of the artists I know, I don’t know any of their work or the names they reference. This is madness and it’s replicated madness, many times over, multiple mini worlds all self perpetuating not even interested in each other. What use is all this, and really what a waste of all this effort and skill. I think the problem is that the ‘other’ seems such a threat, mix all this up and it could start to get interesting.

I think my interest in the relationship between these many cultures is right, it’s what makes me keep going but this ‘coal face’ does make me wonder. The name of my talk was ‘Ways to be Useful’ ,pre talk the American guys saw the title and said ‘well there aint no way we can do that’ - Doze guyzre kcrazee.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 11/05/07 at 08:11 : 2 Comments